SD home to 48 of world's top scientists

K.C. Alfred

Joseph Wang, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Nanoengineering at UCSD is one of the top developers of "wearable technology." He is shown here with a mannequin displaying uses of such technology

Joseph Wang, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Nanoengineering at UCSD is one of the top developers of "wearable technology." He is shown here with a mannequin displaying uses of such technology (K.C. Alfred)

San Diego is home to 48 of the world's most influential scientists and engineers, one of the largest collection of top scholars anywhere, says a new study by the news and information company Thomson Reuters.

The company produced the figure by analyzing how often scientists worldwide were cited by other researchers, mostly between 2002-2012. The list of 3,073 highly cited researchers includes everyone from distinguished biologists at the University of Cambridge to neuroscientists at Harvard to biochemists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Thomson Reuters says the San Diego-La Jolla area ranks sixth nationally in the number of top scholars across the country, placing behind such clusters as Boston- Cambridge and Stanford-Palo Alto, but ahead of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

All but three of the 48 San Diego researchers work on the Torrey Pines Mesa, a roughly two mile long section of La Jolla that features the Salk, UC San Diego, the Scripps Research Institute, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute and the J. Craig Venter Institute. The University of California San Diego dominated locally, placing 27 scientists on the list. Two scholars appear on the list more than once, in different fields.

The recently-released list also includes a Nobel laureate -- Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research -- and several local scientists who are considered potential future Nobel winners, including geneticist Craig Venter, neuroscientist Fred Gage and chemist Napoleone Ferrara. The list also includes Scripps Research chemist Carlos Barbas III, who passed away in June.

Regions with largest number of top scholars

Boston-Cambridge

236

Bethesda-Rockville, MD

91

New York, NY

79

Palo Alto-Stanford

55

Chapel Hill-Durham-Raleigh, NC

52

San Diego

48

Berkeley

44

Los Angeles

41

Houston

38

Seattle

36

UC SAN DIEGO

Hagop Akiskal, psychiatry-psychology

Yuri Bazilevs, computer science

Kristin Cadenhead, psychiatry-psychology

Elsa Cleland, environment-ecology

Don Cleveland, neuroscience-behavior

Anders Dale, neuroscience-behavior

Xin Du, immunology

Mark Estelle, plant-animal science

Napoleone Ferrara, clinical medicine

Uri Gneezy, economics-business

Kun-Liang Guan, molecular biology-genetics

Jeremy Jackson, environment-ecology

Michael Karin, biology-biochemistry

Michael Karin, immunology

Michael Karin, molecular biology-genetics

Jacqueline Kerr, social sciences

Weizhong Li, computer sciences

Berhard Palsson, biology-biochemistry

Sergei Pond, computer science

Bing Ren, molecular biology-genetics

Lewis Rubin, clinical medicine

James Sallis, social sciences

William Sandborn, clinical medicine

Julian Schroeder, plant-animal science

Murray Stein, psychiatry-psychology

Roger Tsien, biology-biochemistry

Joseph Wang, chemistry

Joseph Wang, engineering

Shang-Ping Xie, geosciences

K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The trio's work, says Nobelprize.org, "opened up a completely new field of research in which it is possible to synthesise molecules and material with new properties. Today the results of their basic research are being used in a number of industrial syntheses of pharmaceutical products such as antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs and heart medicines. Nobelprize.org

SCRIPPS RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Phil Baran, chemistry

Carlos Barbas III,* chemistry

Dennis Burton, microbiology

Jerold Chun, pharmacology-toxicology

Benjamin Cravatt, biology-biochemistry

Valery Fokin, chemistry

Pascal Poignard, microbiology

Barry Sharpless, chemistry

Raymond Stevens, biology-biochemistry

Eric Topol, clinical medicine

Ian Wilson, microbiology

Richard Wyatt, microbiology

Jin-Quan Yu, chemistry

SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Joanne Chory, plant-animal science

Joseph Ecker, plant-animal science

Fred Gage, neuroscience-behavior

San Diego State biologist Forest Rohwer was nearly killed by a collapsing iceberg last year during a research dive in the northern Arctic. Courtesy of Forest Rohwer